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THRIVE ON! and Children's Home of Kingston Complete Two-Month Workshop — and Prove What's Possible
THRIVE ON! Network Inc. (THRIVE ON!) and the Children's Home of Kingston (CHK) have completed their most ambitious collaboration to date: an 8-week, 27-hour service workshop that brought CHK Early Thrivers into the heart of Kingston's community, equipping them with real skills, real responsibilities, and a real stake in the places they served.
31 de octubre de 2025
27 Hours. A Lot of Work. Real Impact.
Over eight weeks, CHK Early Thrivers showed up Monday through Thursday and got to work. In just 27 hours of service, they cooked over 450 meals for homeless families living at the Kingston Motel, hand-built and painted 32 wooden crates for the Midtown THRIVE ON! Pink Food Pantry, and helped distribute food to over 500 people in need at Community Action Farm Stand Giveaway events.
They also completed the MiSN "Money Habitudes" financial literacy program, packed hygiene bags for people experiencing homelessness, created an 8-foot paper mache sculpture for community Halloween events, and contributed food reviews to THRIVE ON!’s Kingston Digest — putting their critical thinking on the record for the community to read.
Skills Built Alongside Community
The workshop was designed to be more than service — it was a skills laboratory. Early thrivers left with hands-on experience across a remarkable range of disciplines:
Construction — using hammers, impact drivers, and paint rollers to build and finish wooden crates from scratch, learning vocabulary and technique along the way.
Culinary arts — working in a commercial kitchen to cook balanced, multi-course meals, practicing knife skills, safe food handling, and teamwork under real production conditions.
Food distribution — managing large crowds, operating equipment like pallet jacks and hand trucks, and serving community members with kindness and confidence.
Financial literacy — building budgets, understanding needs vs. wants, and mapping long-term goals through MiSN's Money Habitudes curriculum.
Media and critical thinking — conducting food reviews, capturing video content, and learning how to compare and present information for a public audience.
Woven through all of it were the soft skills that matter most: perseverance, teamwork, communication, and the ability to see a hard task through to the end.
A Partnership That Keeps Deepening
This workshop is the latest chapter in a partnership that has grown steadily since its first two-week pilot in the summer of 2025. What began as an introduction to THRIVE ON!'s Early Thrivers Adjunct route has now become a full, multi-partner program involving CHK, Ulster County Community Action (UCCAC), and the Maternal Infant Services Network (MiSN) — each contributing infrastructure, curriculum, and community reach that no single organization could provide alone.
"There is nothing quite like watching young people discover what they're capable of,” said Candace Lindenlauf, Early Thriver Program Director and Vice President of THRIVE ON!. “These Early Thrivers cooked, built, served, and showed up — day after day — with a kind of enthusiasm that reminded all of us why we do this work. Seeing them step into their own power — recognizing that they can create real change in a real place — that's the whole point."
For THRIVE ON!, the workshop also validated the Adjunct model itself — demonstrating that multiple organizations can align around a shared program to deliver something none of them could build alone, and that youth-led community work is both possible and powerful at scale.
About the Children’s Home of Kingston
The Children’s Home of Kingston provides residential and educational services to youth whose personal, social, developmental, or family situations preclude them from living at home.
About THRIVE ON!
THRIVE ON! is a youth-driven nonprofit based in Kingston, NY. Through its Early Thrivers program and Rootwork incubator, THRIVE ON! equips young people and grassroots leaders to design, build, and lead the solutions their communities need.